What is the imaginative space of literature

Space Theory and Literary Space

Lu Yang

Abstract: Space theory is a hot topic in postmodern scholarship in recent years, especially Edward Sawyer's theory of the third space. The third space can be compared to Borges' "Aleph", which has the great charm of mustard seed. In this way, rereading the literary space, we can read more of what Lefebvre called the production and reproduction of social space.

Keywords: space, third space, Lefebvre, Soja, Kron

Abstract: In the context of Edward Soja's theory of Thirdspace, a highlight among postmodern space theories, in addition to a comparison between Thirdspace and Borges's Aleph, the paper also explored the ways to re-interpret

The end of the twentieth century saw a more or less dramatic 'spatial turn' in the academy, which has been recognized as one of the most significant events in the intellectual and political development of the second half of the twentieth century. Scholars began to look at "spatiality" in humanistic life, shifting the favor previously given to time and history, to social relations and society, to space. The result of spatial reflection is that architecture, urban design, geography, and cultural studies are becoming more and more intertwined with each other. Literary understanding of the modern urban spatial experience, which is characterized by a change from stability and unity to pluralism and mobility, cannot in fact be indifferent. As far as urban space in fiction is concerned, whereas the mode in the 19th century was considered to be narration and description, in the 20th century on the one hand the temporal rhythms of urban life accelerated significantly, and on the other hand the experience of space became fragmented. The recollections in Proust's Remembrance of Days Gone by are no longer formless, and the stream-of-consciousness novels of Joyce and Virginia Wolfe have made complete narratives impossible. What, then, does spatial theory, which has become so prominent in recent years, mean for literature? This article will explore this.

Sawyer and the Third Space

"Third space" is a hot topic in postmodern scholarship in recent years. The concept originated from American postmodern geographer Edward Sawyer's 1996 book The Third Space: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places. Edward Sawyer was born in the Bronx, New York, and later recalled that at the age of 10 he was living like a street geographer in an urban area where cultural diversity was more than evident. What is the third space? Sawyer recognizes that he is using the concept of the third space in its broadest sense, as a conscious attempt to use flexible terminology to capture, as best as possible, the social context in which perceptions, events, representations, and meanings are, in fact, constantly being shifted and displaced. In a broader context, since the study of space became postmodern epiphanies in the second half of the twentieth century, there have been two broad orientations in thinking about space. Space is seen both as a concrete material form that can be labeled, analyzed, and interpreted, and as a spiritual construct, a conceptual form about space and its representation of the meaning of life. The third space proposed by Soya, viewed in this way, is the product of a revaluation of this dualism, which, according to Soya's own interpretation, encompasses both the material and the spiritual dimensions of space while at the same time transcending the first two and presenting a great openness to all new modes of spatial thinking.

Referring to French philosopher Lefebvre's 1974 book The Production of Space, Sawyer analyzes what he calls three "spatial epistemologies". The "first spatial epistemology" is the oldest, Sawyer pointed out that this way of thinking has dominated spatial knowledge for centuries, and its object of knowledge is mainly what Lefebvre said that perception, material space, can be observed, experiments, and other empirical means to make a direct grasp of our families, buildings, neighborhoods, villages, cities, regions, Our families, buildings, neighborhoods, villages, cities, regions, nations, states, and even the world economy and global geopolitics are typical objects of this spatial epistemology. The first spatial epistemology emphasizes objectivity and materiality and seeks to establish a formal science of space. The relationship between human beings and nature, the geography of development and the environment, is thus read as an empirical text on two levels: the original method of spatial analysis, which provides a centralized and accurate portrayal of the object, and the move to the periphery, which explicates space primarily in terms of social, psychological, and biophysical processes.

In comparison, the "second spatial epistemology" is much more recent, and can be seen as a reaction to the closed and forced objective nature of the first spatial epistemology. In short it is art against science, spirit against matter, subject against object. According to Sawyer, it is the assumption that the production of knowledge is accomplished primarily through the spatial reproduction of discursive constructs, so that attention is focused on the space of conception rather than the space of perception. The second spatial form takes ideas from the conceived, or imagined, geography and then projects them into the empirical world. Since the spirit is so fascinating, interpretation in fact becomes more of a reflective, subjective, introspective, philosophical, personalized activity. Therefore, the second space is a good place for philosophers, artists and individualized architects to show their skills, and not only that, it is also a good place for debates on what is the nature of space? Is it absolute, relative, or relational? Is it abstract or concrete? Is it a way of thinking, or is it a material reality? The thought of it all calls for considerable speculation. But Sawyer also recognizes that the boundaries between the two spatial epistemologies are sometimes not so clear-cut. Sometimes, he quotes Lefebvre, they seem to be armed and intent on fighting to the death, and sometimes one contains and promotes the other. In recent years, the convergence of positivism, structuralism, post-structuralism, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and so on, has contributed to the fusion of the two spaces, with the analysts of the first space seeking more for the conceptual, and the analysts of the second space, conversely, delighting in the forms of the material space.

The "third space epistemology" is thus both a deconstruction and a reconstruction of the epistemologies of the first and second space, and, in Sawyer's own words, "derives from an affirmative deconstruction and an illuminating reconstruction of the first-space-second-space dichotomy, a deconstruction and an illuminating reconstruction of the first-space-second-space dichotomy. deconstruction and illuminating reconfiguration, is another example of what I call Othering-Thirding. Such a thirdization serves not only to critique the ways of thinking about first and second space, but also to rejuvenate their means of grasping spatial knowledge by infusing them with new possibilities, possibilities that traditional spatial science has failed to recognize." As another example of "othering"-"thirding," it is clear that the third space is more than just a critique and a negation, as the word "deconstruction" Just as the term "deconstruction" has been recognized by most people for its affirmative and constructive connotations, the epistemology of "third space", while questioning the way of thinking of the first and second space, is also injecting new possibilities that the traditional spatial sciences have failed to recognize in the previous ones, so as to rejuvenate their means of grasping spatial knowledge. To this end, Sawyer emphasizes that in the third dimension, everything comes together: subjectivity and objectivity, abstraction and figuration, real and imaginary, knowable and unknowable, repetition and difference, spirit and body, conscious and unconscious, disciplinary and interdisciplinary, to name but a few. A corollary of this is that any division of the third space into specialized categories of knowledge and disciplines will undermine its deconstructive and constructive edge, in other words, its infinite openness. Therefore, both third space itself and third space epistemology will always remain open.

The Third Space and the Aleph

In The Third Space, Sawyer devotes a section to a comparison between his third space and Borges's Aleph. The third space is different from the physical space and the spiritual space, but also embraces both, and then transcends them. According to Sawyer, it is like the insignificant, but all-encompassing Aleph in the novel of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges. It is really a mustard seed, the sky and the earth. "Aleph" is a short story written by the famous Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in 1945. Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, mystical philosophers believe that it means "to learn to tell the truth", in the novel, it is a living encompassing the microcosm. In the novel, it comes to life as a microcosm that encompasses everything. At the beginning of the novel, the author quotes two passages as the epigraph, one of which is from Act II, Scene 2 of Hamlet: "O God, even if I were trapped in a nut shell/ I would still think myself king of infinite space." The second is from Hobbes' Leviathan, Chapter IV, Scene XLVI: "They will teach us that eternity is the present stillness, what the philosophical school calls the solidification of time; but they or any other do not understand this, any more than they understand that infinite expanse is the solidification of space." Sawyer claims that he fell for the Aleph piece once again after rereading The Production of Space. Indeed, Borges works are stylistically clean, well-written, fantastically conceived and structured, and the plots of his novels often unfold in exotic Oriental settings that are absurdly bizarre and fantastical, with strong mystical overtones. To a certain extent, this may be the same as Sawyer's Third Dimension traffic.

Regarding Aleph, Sawyer quotes Borges himself as saying that eternity is about time and Aleph is about space. In eternity, all time, including past, present, and future **** time exists. In aleph, all of cosmic space is seen in its original form in a small, shiny sphere about an inch in diameter. He quotes at length from the novel:

I closed my eyes, then opened them again a moment later. I saw Aleph.

Now I come to the hard-to-put-into-words center of my story; my despair as a writer begins here. Any language is an alphabet of symbols, and the use of language presupposes a past experience that the interlocutor ***has***; how can I convey this to others when my mortified memory simply cannot include that infinite Aleph? Mystics make much use of symbols when they meet with similar difficulties: the Persians, when wishing to indicate the Divine Word, speak of a bird of many birds; Aranus de Insulis speaks of a sphere, the center of which is in all places, and the circumference of which is nowhere at all; and Ezekiel speaks of an angel with four faces, facing east, west, south, and north at the same time. (It is not without reason that I recall these incomprehensible similarities, for they are related to the Aleph.) Perhaps the Divine Word would not prohibit me from discovering an equivalent sight, but the story would be tainted by literature and fiction. Moreover, the central problem is insoluble: it is impossible to synthesize an infinite totality, even if one synthesizes a part of it. At that remarkable moment I saw millions of pleasant or appalling scenes; what astonished me most was that all the scenes were in the same place, without overlapping or transparency, and that what I saw with my eyes happened at the same time: what I remembered was sequential, because language has a sequential order. In short, I remembered part of it.

I saw at the bottom of the steps, a little to the right, a little orb of flashing colors, so bright that one dared not press one's eyes against it. At first I thought it was spinning; then I realized that the dazzling field contained in the ball caused the illusion of spinning.

The diameter of the Aleph is about two or three centimeters, but the space of the universe is all encompassed in it, and there is no proportional diminution in size. Every thing (mirror glass, for example) is an infinite thing, because I see clearly from any angle of the universe. I see vast oceans, dawn and dusk, the crowds of America, a silvery cobweb at the center of a black pyramid, a crumbling labyrinth (that's London), countless eyes looking at me as if I were looking in a mirror, all the mirrors in the world, but none of them reflect me, and I see in the backyard of a house in Sorrel Street the exact same thin brickwork that I saw in the front room of a house in Freibenton Street thirty years ago. Seeing exactly the same fine brick floor, I see bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, steam, the rumbling equatorial desert and every grain of sand ...... I see the frightening remains of what was once the wonderful Beatrice, I see the cycles of my own dark red blood, I see the associations of love and the changes of death, and I see Aleph. I see the world in the midst of Aleph from every angle, I see Aleph again in the world, I see the world in Aleph, I see my face and my dirty organs, I see your face, I feel dizzy, I cry because I see with my own eyes that secret, hypothetical thing whose name has been stolen repeatedly but which no one has faced up to: the unfathomable universe.

Borges writes of this, professing that he felt infinite reverence and infinite sorrow. Sawyer, on the other hand, found that linking the meaning of Aleph with Lefebvre's theory of spatial production could fundamentally break down the old barriers of spatial knowledge, and enhance the complete openness of the third space he was talking about: everything is seen in the third space, and we can look at it from any point of view, and all the things in it are not clear, and yet the third space is mysterious, and no one has ever been able to see or understand it completely. It is an "unimaginable universe". Therefore, anyone who wants to use words and texts to grasp this all-encompassing space will be in vain. Since language and text flow out of time, this form of narrative and the way of telling history can only ever scratch the surface of the "Aleph"-like ****temporal state of the third dimension. Sawyer believes that here, Lefebvre, "the production of space" and Borges described Aleph are similar, the same constantly referred to language, text, discourse, geography and historical codification, etc., is unable to fully grasp the spatiality of human beings, or as the "Aleph" quoted at the beginning of the "Leviathan," the infinite expanse of the place: an infinite expanse of space!

Is this infinite space really beyond words? Surely our language may not be so untrustworthy. Sawyer points out that, like Borges's aleph, Lefebvre's "production of space" involves a dazzling variety of spaces. Citing the alphabetical list of spatial forms given in Michel Dill's Postmodern Pedigree, he points out that the author sees Lefebvre as the progenitor of critical postmodernism. These spatial forms, plus Sawyer's own additions, are roughly sixty in number, including absolute space, abstract space, appropriate space, constructed space, architectural space, behavioral space, bodily space, capitalist space, conceptual space, concrete space, ambivalent space, and cultural space. How can these many noisy and different spaces be harmonized and unified? Sawyer argues that Borges's "Aleph" offers a model of contemplative meditation that is admittedly good but eclectic, whereas, as Lefebvre's The Production of Space puts it, his political and theoretical project is aimed at exploring the space towards a different kind of social life and a different kind of production, and thus it crosses the gap between science and utopia, between the real and the ideal, It crosses the gap between science and utopia, between the real and the ideal, between the conceived and the actual, exploring the dialectic of the possible and the impossible, and ultimately transcending these dichotomies, so that Lefebvre is always concerned with reality, inseparable from the social process of production and reproduction, in short. In short, the social production of social space is the greatest revelation that Lefebvre, and also Borges, gave to the "third space".

Rereading Literary Space

What does space as social production of social space mean for an understanding of literature? Mike Crown, who now teaches in the Department of Geography at the University of Durham in the UK, devoted his 1998 book Cultural Geography to the meaning of space in literature under the title Literary Landscapes. Crown, who belongs to a new breed of cultural geographers that has come to prominence in recent years, points out that over the past 20 years or so geographers have begun to pay increasing attention to a wide variety of literary works as different modes of exploring the meaning of landscapes. Literatures such as novels, poems, plays, sagas, and so on, are thus each showing how they understand and articulate spatial phenomena. For example, first and foremost, the depiction of place in literature is another colorful repository of geography. But the geographical depictions in literary space are much more meaningful than their statistical significance. Regarding the relationship between literature and the outside world, Crane notes:

Texts are not mere reflections of the outside world. To expect literature to respond to the world how "accurately" and in what way is to lead one astray. Such a naive approach misses most of the useful and interesting components of the literary landscape. Literary landscapes are best viewed as a combination of literature and landscape, rather than as isolated mirrors that reflect or distort the outside world. Similarly, it is not just for some objective geographical knowledge that provides a kind of emotional echo. Rather, literature offers ways of looking at the world that reveal a range of interesting, experiential and intellectual landscapes. To call such a view subjectivist is to miss the point. Literature is a social product - its conceptual circulation is, in fact, a social process of meaning.

As Lefebvre's theory that space is produced for society and also produces society suggests, literature is likewise a social medium, in which the ideologies and beliefs of different people in a particular era organize the text and also organize the text. The text organizes what the author wants to say, what he can say, and even what he feels compelled to say, and at the same time it organizes the way of speaking. So texts are intertwined, woven into the cultural conventions they either recognize or intend to subvert. And since the text must be read in order to realize itself, the presence of the reader will be as essential to the communication, circulation, and renewal of meaning as the author's act of writing.

Crane thus emphasizes that literature is not a mirror held up to the world, but a complex web of meaning. Any individual narrative is inextricably linked to other narrative spaces. These spaces do not necessarily have to be literary, but can include official documents, academic writings, and even propaganda advertisements. The text thus forms a large network of ideas and concepts, and it is within this network that it establishes its own way of looking at the world. "Realism" is such a connection, but it is neither a guideline nor an exclusion. As far as its ideology of realism is concerned, realism is rather a product of urban space. Our experience of space is certainly more than urban. In response, Crane says that each of the literary approaches to geography's space offers a particular horizon for understanding a landscape, each incorporates other approaches, each sets its readership, and each has its own rhetorical style that seeks to conjure up a compelling picture. Literature and geography are certainly different. Literature can create imaginary places, as the Duke of Theseus says in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the poet's eyeglasses, with a wild twirl, can see from the sky to the earth, give shape to things that don't exist, and give a place and a name to things that are not there. But who can deny that literature does indeed play a pivotal role in the shaping of our geographical imagination? Crown points out that Hardy spares no effort in describing the folklore and slang of Wessex, demonstrating a vivid and organic regional cultural identity. He is rather writing an elegy for a dying rural landscape and rural way of life. The tragic fate of Tess's family, forced to leave the countryside, illustrates the process of social upheaval and impoverishment of the countryside. The nouveau riche D'Urberville family, on the other hand, vividly depicts another dimension of social division. The landscape in Tess of the D'Urbervilles thus reveals how the power of money permeates rural space, and it is nowhere more evident than in Alex's control over Tess. Poor Tess is a helpless bird in the face of a social force that is as far-reaching as fate. In this way, the significance of literature for geography lies not in what a writer describes about a place, but in the texture of the literature itself, which shows how society is structured by space. Indeed, it is through Hardy that most people know Wessex, and the Wessex of Hardy's novels is, in Aristotle's words, no doubt more "philosophical" than the Wessex of history.

But examining the spatial connections between literature and geography is not a matter of overlaying one map on top of another. A better approach might be to explore specific spatial divisions within the literary text, which can be found in plot, character, and autobiography, among other things. Crane claims that it is possible to construct a sense of home within the text, which can help us to understand the geography of imperial and modern societies. For example, the typical geographic structure of a travel story is the setting of a home, whether it is a lost home or a returned home. The spatial storytelling of many texts he reads echoes this theme of travel, with the protagonist first leaving the country, suffering, and then, after all the wonders, finally returning home. Even one of the oldest human epics from a Middle Eastern civilization, such as the Gilgamesh, already demonstrates this pattern without a hitch. So does Homer's Odyssey. And Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, in particular, recounts the tale poignantly. Similar structures can be seen in other fairy tales, chivalric tales, ballads, and the plots of hundreds of novels, including tramp novels and more recent travelogues.

What then is the social and cultural significance of this structure? What Crane is looking at here is the geography of gender politics. The home is a space of belonging and security, but it is also a form of captivity. In order to prove his worth, the male protagonist then always enters, consciously or unconsciously, into a masculine space of adventure, as in the case of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus has to leave his homeland, first to lay siege to Trojan for ten years, and then to return to his native land for ten years. These twenty years of absence from his homeland are seen as a time of trials and tribulations to prove his cultural identity, especially the ten years on the way back to his homeland, where he is able to triumph over all manner of bewitching women with typical manly ingenuity and cunning. Returning to his homeland, he finds that his wife, Panerope, is no longer able to defend herself against the wannabe's advances and her son's claim to the throne, and is forced to reassert her authority and re-establish her patriarchal position. Comparing the five epics on the Trojan theme, the Odyssey is thought-provoking in that it is the only one in which the protagonist arrives home safely. In others, such as Orestes, Agamemnon returns home to be greeted by the bloody murder of his wife in conjunction with her lover. Returning home thus reveals a more sinister dimension of meaning, suggesting that masculinity in the home can be just as fragile as it is vulnerable. Crane points out that if one reads the spatial structure of this home in literature, one can see that the starting point is almost invariably the loss of the home. The journey home is organized, as it were, around an original point of loss. There are numerous stories suggesting that returning home is far from being an unquestionable theme, and that even if the home is regained after it has been lost, it is no longer likely to be in its original form. Therefore, the space of "home" constructed in this structure can be regarded as a kind of fictionalization of tracing back to the roots, a kind of nostalgia for remembering the lost origin. This is another way of showing that literary depictions can reveal how space is organized and how it is defined by social behavior. The significance of space in literature, from this point of view, is far more subtle and complex than the significance of place and scene.

A large part of space in literature is the space of the city, and Crane points out that there is a long tradition of depicting cities in fiction, but the city is not just a repository of urban life, not just a scene in which stories and plots unfold, no matter how colorfully they may be narrated. The cityscape is also an expression of social and life beliefs. His example for this is Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. He points out that Hugo builds the central plot of the novel around Paris, and that the narrow streets and alleys inhabited by the poor constitute a dark imaginative space, a kind of mystical geography of the unknown parts of the city. Crane points out that the novel adopts a panoramic view from above, but this view still fails to reach the full knowledge of the city, which is still dark and gloomy, with omens as dense as a labyrinth. On the other hand, the space of the poor man's alley is contrasted with the space of the official and the state. Here Crane realizes that Hugo is consciously targeting these poor streets and alleys by depicting the thoroughfares that are the pride of today's Paris. The boulevards lead to a maze of narrow streets and alleys that become thoroughfares for the military and police to suppress the poor. Thus, there is a contrast between the open, formal, state-controlled geography on the one hand, and the obscure, narrow space of the poor on the other. The novel can thus be read as utilizing spatial depiction to allegorize a geography of knowledge that reveals how the state responds to potential citizen riots, and so it is also a geography of state power. Cron argues that this claim is not an overstatement; for example, one of the first things to be destroyed during the Paris uprising of 1848 was the streetlight. For it was the streetlights that allowed the police to see what the poor were doing. Viewed in this way, the streetlights of Paris are the eyes of power, outlining the public **** geography of surveillance and control. How different the symbolism of light and darkness here is from our traditional understanding of this dichotomy.

If we take 19th-century Paris as our starting point, says Cron, then we can see how the emotional experience of urban life has changed. The central concept of industrialization is modernity. The modernization of the city led to its boundless expansion, with the result that the city's space became too large to recognize. To illustrate this, one need only compare the old concept of the village with today's city. He points out that as early as the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, sociologists such as Simmel compared the village to the city, pointing out that people in village communities interacted directly with each other, were familiar with each other's work, history, and character, and that their world was relatively predictable. The modern city, by contrast, is a world of strangers, where people do not know each other, where they do not know each other, and where the serenity and calm of the village is replaced by the hustle and bustle of the city. In literature, Baudelaire's image of the "flaneur" of mid-19th century Paris is a typical witness to the modern city. This "flaneur" has nothing better to do than to wander the streets, savoring the hustle and bustle of the city as if it were a landscape. His eyes swept over the new products in the new space, and he could not help but feel a little bit of satisfaction as he watched the traffic and exchange of goods in the streets. The so-called new space refers to the arcades and department stores that abounded in 19th century Paris. Crane reminds us of the gender of the "swinger": he is a man, not a woman. The public square did not seem to be a good place for bourgeois women to laze around. The male tramp is thus contrasted with the women in Zola's novels. The women in Zola's novels are also obsessed with a wide range of goods, but they go to the mall rather than the street. The mall, an enclosed space, is a more fluid place than the city street, and Crane argues that its emergence as a central scene in literature marks the shift of urban space from public to private space. It is not only an architectural and economic displacement, but also a displacement of the urban experience.

Literature, in Cron's view, participates in this shift in spatial experience. Writers like Baudelaire and Flaubert, "The Prodigal Son", were heavily autobiographical. The influence of literary style on the depiction of the city is also very different. Literature should not be seen as merely reflecting or describing the city, merely as a kind of repository. In fact, most geographers who read literature in the past basically practiced the above concept of reading and interpretation, treating works as passive social science ready-made materials and expecting them to provide clear and transparent information. But novelists are certainly not geographers, Crane points out, and we should instead look closely at how the city is constructed in the novel, as Hugo's example suggests, in order to recognize that modernity is not merely literally depicted, but becomes an integral part of the way the city is depicted in its own right. Thus, Baudelaire's poems are not only about Paris, but the text itself seems to be involved in the strange movements of the "wanderer," who wanders past countless people, but never grasps the city as a whole. Because the spatial experience of the city simply won't tolerate such a condescending mode of grasping.

From this, we can see that the relationship between literature and spatial theory is no longer a reproduction of the latter, and that literature itself cannot stay out of the picture, pointing out the mountains and the rivers, but on the contrary, the text is bound to plunge into the space, and become an organic part of the pluralistic and open spatial experience itself. In other words, literature and space are not two kinds of knowledge order that are not related to each other, the so-called first one exalts the imagination, and the latter focuses on the fact, on the contrary, it is better to say that they are the production and reproduction of social space cast by the text, which is meaningful in any case to emphasize this point.